In the telecommunications industry, telephone cable is introduced to individual telephone sites such as residences, mainly through use of a splice of the signal wires of the cable to respective house wires at a junction located outside or inside the house. The junction is housed within a protective enclosure which is mounted usually to an outside wall of the house. One example of an assembly of a splice terminal block and self-sealing enclosure therefor is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,219,302 and 5,145,388, both assigned to the assignee hereof. Therein, a terminal block has a single-piece barrel-shaped terminal with connecting sections for both wires to be spliced, and the terminal is of the insulation piercing or displacement type which eliminates the need for stripping the insulation from the signal wire conductors. A dielectric housing includes an integrally molded center post within a tubular terminal-receiving housing section, both coextending from a common base section and defining an annular cavity, the housing section providing wire-receiving openings through side walls and into the cavity aligned with an aperture through the center post, enabling insertion of wire ends during splicing.
A barrel-shaped terminal and an associated lug-capped tubular actuator is then assembled to the housing, with the barrel terminal surrounding the center post within the cavity and having apertured insulation displacement contact sections which are initially aligned with the wire-receiving openings of the housing and center post, and the actuator also having profiled apertures therethrough extending partially around the circumference and also aligned with the wire-receiving openings of the housing, center post and terminal. The lug extends above the housing upon assembly to be accessible to tooling for rotation thereof to rotate the actuator and the terminal.
During splicing the wire ends of both wires are inserted into respective openings and through the apertured contact sections until abutting stop surfaces of the housing which then holds the wire ends at two spaced locations, both outside and within the terminal wall; the actuator is then rotated through an angular distance of about a quarter turn in turn rotating the terminal, and the constricted edges of a precisely profiled slot extending from each of the terminal's apertures penetrate the wire insulation of both wires simultaneously and engage the conductors therewithin, completing the splice.
The terminal blocks of U.S. Pat. No. 5,219,302 are modular in nature, comprising a pair defined in the same housing member for mounting within an enclosure adapted for a plurality of such modules. The two-terminal block housing is mountable in a selected orientation such that the wire-receiving openings of each of the terminal blocks are oriented facing a cable exit of the enclosure, or other common point from where the pairs of conductors originate as discrete wires from two cables.
It is desired to provide the telephone line to a particular customer with overvoltage protection on the circuits which protect the circuits of the customer's equipment from energy surface, such as from lightning strikes and the like. Several examples of protector elements are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,158,869; 4,161,762; and 4,133,019. Modules containing such protectors are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,742,541; 4,159,500; 4,613,732 and 4,675,778. The telecommunications industry has established standards for performance and certain dimensional and design requirements for such protectors; one example is Bellcore Technical Reference No. TR-TSY-000070, Issue 1, February 1985, entitled "Customer Station Gas Tube Protector Units".
There is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,296,646 and assigned to the assignee hereof, a protector module for a telephone line junction box and a method of protecting a circuit. A module contains an array of protectors removably contained therein, where the module includes a housing of dielectric material defining protector-receiving cavities into which respective protectors are insertable. The module includes a ground plate disposed across the upper face of the housing body and includes a plurality of openings aligned with the cavities to define the peripheries of the plurality of cavities to become electrically engaged with a ground electrode of each protector. In one embodiment a first contact is mounted at the bottom of each cavity and includes a first contact section on a spring arm exposed within the cavity for electrical engagement with an active electrode on the bottom of the protector upon protector insertion. A second contact section extends below the base of the housing to be easily terminatable to an associated conductor wire of a stub cable of the main distribution line which then extends along the base of the housing to the housing of another module for termination to a terminal which splices the conductor wire to a conductor of the service wire, as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,006,077, after which the exposed stub cable conductor wires and the second contact sections are potted and environmentally sealed. The ground plate is commoned to a ground stud of the enclosure for commoning to a system ground.
It is desired to provide a module for a pair of signal wires of a customer line with protector elements which can be assembled within an enclosure such that each protector is electrically connected in-line for the circuits interconnected by the terminals of the terminal block contained within the enclosure, upon termination of a service wire to a terminal.
It is desired that such module permit in-line circuit protection simultaneously with splicing of the pair of wires of the service line.